AMD Launches Ryzen 7000 Series Desktop Processors with Zen 4 Architecture
amd.com
amd.com
I know this is a desktop launch and all but I wonder how much does this update catches upto Apple M1/M2s. With 6000U series CPUs the gap was already closer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOSQIUGGdYE but it looks like this will get it pretty close. Obviously getting Laptops on new 7000 series will take time. AMD's achilles heel has always been availability when it comes to Laptops.Many paper launched SKUs of 6000 series Laptops are still not available in US market. Heck, you will be hard pressed to find a 99W laptop with AMD only CPU (basically Apple's flagship 16inch configuration).
Then again, at the same time, the 3090 machine can do CUDA and other useful things.
>The greatest performance gains are actually at the lowest TDPs, where the 7950X saw a 74% increase in Cinebench R23 MT performance. These advantages actually decreased as TDPs went up, dropping to 37% at 105W, and finally 35% at 170W.
When AMD isn’t loading CPU clockspeeds into the stratosphere – which is always well into the diminishing returns of the voltage/frequency curve – Zen 4 is significantly more power efficient than its predecessor.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17552/amd-details-ryzen-7000-...
The problem is that Intel is reviving their Pentium 4 strategy of performance via ridiculous frequencies and voltages, and AMD is following suit.
Contrast to Apple, where the strategy is throwing die space at more execution units and running the clocks at the efficient end of the voltage frequency curve.
The M2 clocks up to 3.5 Ghz, while AMD is targeting up to 5.7 Ghz.
My money is on the new I/O die being the source of most of the improvement in the low TDP range. That thing was pretty power hungry on 12nm GloFo; 6nm TSMC is a pretty sizeable leap.
Obviously there are improvements everywhere in the V/F curve, implying that the CCDs have also had solid improvements, but since I/O die power draw doesn't change much with CCD frequency, it's a bigger slice of the pie (so to speak) at lower clocks.
> Contrast to Apple, where the strategy is throwing die space at more execution units and running the clocks at the efficient end of the voltage frequency curve.
That's the benefit of having a single customer. Apple knows they're never going to build mobile devices with good thermals, so their chips will never clock to the moon, so they have freedom to make a much wider core that (almost certainly) has larger clock domains and would be difficult to run at higher clocks.
Otoh, AMD has many customers and those customers like high clockspeed, and their competitor will give it to them, so AMD needs to have a design that can clock to the moon, but also be power efficient at lower clocks.
They seem to be doing just fine with thermals.
>Like the 2020 M1 MacBook Pro, this laptop doesn’t get overly warm. Its underside reached a maximum temperature of 85 degrees, which is ten degrees lower than what we consider to be uncomfortably hot for a laptop. Likewise, the touchpad never went above 79 degrees.
This is one of, if not, the coolest-running and quietest laptops I’ve ever used.
https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/macbook-pro-13-inch-m2-202...
Contrast to the Dell XPS 13 Plus:
>the XPS 13 Plus' fan was really struggling here because, boy oh boy, did this thing get hot. After a few hours of regular use (which, in my case, is a dozen or so Chrome tabs with Slack running over top), this laptop was boiling. I was getting uncomfortable keeping my hands on the palm rests and typing on the keyboard. Putting it on my lap was off the table.
https://www.theverge.com/23284276/dell-xps-13-plus-intel-202...
For those who want a laptop, chasing performance via ever increasing clock speeds and voltages is problematic.
If they will have something special for Mac Pro, it would resemble AMD's strategy.
I don't think it's a "problem" per se.
TDP is a ceiling, "power consumption under the maximum theoretical load", and it allows for higher clocks, yes, and especially across more cores.
Unlike Apple, AMD and Intel have to compete with each other and care about how well games perform. So single core clock speed matters more. So while they work towards efficiency on the one end, they still try to push upwards on thermal headroom and clock speeds.
It would be a problem if Intel and AMD only chased high clock speeds, but ignored everything else (especially efficiency) entirely. But Zen 4 is a terrible example of AMD ignoring efficiency. (+13% IPC, +74% performance at 65W compared to Zen 3.)
So in theory AMD Zen 4 APU on the same Low Power N5 should be even more efficient.
But if we do Geekbench 5 with linear scaling, my guess would be the Zen 4 still only gets about 1400 point with 3.5Ghz in the best case scenario. Which is still not bad.
A lot of what Apple has shown to the world with A13 to A15's design will be coming to Zen 5 and its iteration Zen 6. I suspect only then will we see AMD catching up.
Or Nuvia / Qualcomm and Apple still has a few tricks to further increase Pref / Watt.
Was the article linked changed?
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17552/amd-details-ryzen-7000-...
There, you'll see "up to 62% lower power for the same performance" and "up to 49% more performance at the same power."
It appears that the new micro architecture is not providing any performance increase itself since 4.5Ghz is 32% faster than the previous 3.4Ghz clock ... and AMD is measuring a 29% IPC increase.
All of the performance gains must be purely from going to 5nm (vs 7nm).
For reference, the previous chip (5950X) had a base clock of 3.4Ghz [0] and this new 7950X has a base clock of 4.5Ghz.
[0] https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-9-5950x
EDIT: I'm confused, why the downvotes? Why not just message below if you don't agree with something and we can have a discussion about it.
What happens is that Zen 4 has the same execution units as Zen 3, so any program which can keep all the execution units busy is accelerated on Zen 4 only by the greater clock frequency.
However Zen 4 has a new frontend for instruction fetching and decoding and for branch prediction. Many programs will be executed more efficiently than on Zen 3, with a better utilization of the execution units, leading to the claimed IPC improvement of 13% on average.
Additionally, rewriting a program to use AVX-512 can also improve the utilization of the execution units, leading to a speed-up greater than the clock frequency ratio.
Support for a certain ISA does not imply anything about the speed of the CPU, even if sometimes the CPU vendors change in the same generation both the ISA and the microarchitecture, resulting in greater throughput.
In this case AMD has postponed the improvement of the execution units for Zen 5. Even if the support for AVX-512 does not improve the maximum possible throughput, it improves the average throughput over many programs. The same is true for most of the Intel CPUs that support AVX-512, except for the top models of server or workstation CPUs, because they have one of the 512-bit FMA units disabled, which results in the same maximum throughput as on Zen 4 or on the older CPUs, since Haswell.
"On some processors AVX-512 instructions cause a frequency throttling even greater than its predecessors, causing a penalty for mixed workloads. The additional downclocking is triggered by the 512-bit width of vectors and depend on the nature of instructions being executed, and using the 128 or 256-bit part of AVX-512 (AVX-512VL) does not trigger it. As a result, gcc and clang default to prefer using the 256-bit vectors. ()"
() - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56852812/simd-instructio...
Most AVX-512 instructions have 3 variants, with 512-bit registers, with 256-bit registers or with 128-bit registers.
When using the 256-bit or the 128-bit AVX-512 instructions, there has never been any disadvantage versus using AVX.
The only problems have been when using the 512-bit AVX-512 instructions, especially on the CPUs derived from Skylake Server, due to the way how Intel has implemented the clock frequency control.
Using the 512-bit AVX-512 instructions requires more power than when using the 256-bit AVX-512 instructions, the same as when using e.g. 4 cores instead of 2 cores. In both cases, when doubling the operation width or when doubling the number of active cores, the clock frequency is reduced.
When a program has a large proportion of 512-bit instructions, then the throughput is higher despite the lower clock frequency.
On the other hand, when a program has only a few 512-bit instructions, the execution will be slowed down for almost a second after 512-bit instructions are no longer used, until the CPU decides to power down the upper half of the 512-bit units.
All this problem is caused because the Intel CPU tries to be too smart and decides automatically when to power down the unused units.
In the similar case when using more cores, there is no problem because when the core is no longer used, the program has a halt or a MWAIT instruction which powers down immediately the core, restoring the higher clock frequency.
If Intel had provided an instruction like "end of 512-bit instructions" to power down the upper halves of the execution units immediately, there would have been no problems with the slow down caused by sporadically using a few 512-bit instructions, exactly like there is no problem when launching some extra execution threads, because the clock frequency is restored when the extra threads finish or are suspended.
Because Zen 4 has the same execution units as Zen 3, using AVX-512 on Zen 4 will not cause any kind of slow down that would not have also happened when using AVX on Zen 3.
It does not tell you how long a clock cycle takes. It tells you how long a clock cycle takes when the CPU is massively loaded on all threads, in adverse thermal conditions. If you have better than average cooling, you will never see the base clock under load. If you are running just a single thread, you will always boost to Fmax.
(Base clock speeds are not relevant or used in their performance comparisons.)
(Was the article link changed after posting. Others in this thread are referencing other things I also don't see in the article)
Here's a direct link to the relevant slide: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/17552/Ryzen%207000%20Tech%...
Furthermore, architecture determines what frequency can be achieved. Designers can choose to sacrifice IPC to increase frequency, or vice-versa. We could build a machine with ridiculously high IPC if you don't mind it running at 1 MHz.
Honestly I think a lot of modern benchmarkery has ended up too far down the "cover all the use cases" rabbit holes, and there's not enough coverage of the kind of boring scalar workloads that most of these systems are being purchased to run.
AMD Ryzen 9 7950X 16C/32T Up to 5.7 / 4.5 GHZ 80MB Gen 5 170W $699
AMD Ryzen 9 7900X 12C/24T Up to 5.6 / 4.7 GHZ 76MB Gen 5 170W $549
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X 8C/16T Up to 5.4 / 4.5 GHZ 40MB Gen 5 105W $399
AMD Ryzen 5 7600X 6C/12T Up to 5.3 / 4.7 GHZ 38MB Gen 5 105W $299
* Zen 4 is more efficient (up to 74% more efficient at 65W)
* Zen 4 will be used for desktop, server and mobile chips
* Ryzen 7000 is clocked a good bit higher than Ryzen 5000
* On the desktop, higher maximum clock speeds for single and multi-core workloads are desired
* The higher TDP is to allow for higher clock speeds for single and multi-core workloads on the desktop
So the TDP doesn't scale linearly?
> TDP stands for Thermal Design Power, in watts, and refers to the power consumption under the maximum theoretical load. [0]
It's basically a ceiling.
[0] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...
Since you mentioned "up to 74% more efficient at 65W" what I meant is if the perf per watt (and hence the temp) doesn't scale linearly with the amount of work.
The 7700X has about double the TDP of the 3700X but about a 50% increase in perf.
When you're comparing 7700X to 3700X, are you talking about performance at the same TDP limits, the same clock speed, or maximum performance?
Note that the total power a CPU draws is proportional to its capacitance (fixed) * its frequency * the square of its voltage + some other stuff that's generally the same across CPUs of the same generation.
But that doesn't quite tell the whole story, either; as you increase the frequency you also have to feed more voltage to the CPU to keep it stable for signal-processing reasons (a higher voltage means more difference between 0 and 1, and when you're right on the edge of it not working that will make the difference between a successful compute and a crash).
As such, when you're trying to make a CPU and want to chase clocks, you get bit twice: first by the increased frequency due to physics, and twice by the (square of the) increased voltage requirements for stability. So running at 6 GHz and requiring 1.2V to get there is significantly more expensive power-wise than running that same processor at 4 GHz and only needing 0.8V.
The only real way to fix that is microarchitecture, of course; the trick with Intel in particular is that they've been milking the same architecture they came up with in 2007 and aside from adding some Atom cores to its latest models have done basically nothing but shrink the die so it's natural that they're falling behind now.
Perf/watt has substantially improved, as have capability (like double the memory speed, double the memory channels, and double the PCIe bandwidth).
Sure if power and cooling are available it clocks up higher, but you don't have to. Most BIOS will let you control the clock speed if you want.
Even more, you can cap the 7600X at 65W. All AMD cpus have configurable TDP, the advertised number is the default. Going above is overclocking, but dropping it is within spec. If you do it, your cpu will just use less power under load and be a bit slower.
Ideally, portage would take memory (including ramdisk) requirements of packages into account when scheduling builds (some packages do check for free memory) and ask as a make jobserver [0] (with patches for non-make build systems to support jobservers) to always fully use the available resources.
[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Job-Slots...
So there is definitely a use case, it’s just maybe not for you
> very few use cases
The average person is not compiling programs or dealing with Kubernetes.
Don't get me wrong, they still work amazingly well for games. It's just that they sacrificed some performance in those chips for the higher core count so it only makes sense they'd want to push that further.
But my guess is they don't want to compete with their threadripper line. Unfortunately those come much later in the product cycle so we'll probably be waiting some time for a Zen 4 threadripper.
There is also little doubt that AMD Raphael will be better than Intel Raptor Lake at multi-threaded tasks, even if they now have the same number of threads. The reason is that AMD is made with the much more efficient TSMC process and the consequence is that at equal power consumption the AMD CPUs will reach much higher clock frequencies.
This is the essential difference between single-threaded and multi-threaded tasks, during the former the performance is limited by the maximum turbo clock frequency, while during the latter the performance is limited by the clock frequency at a fixed power consumption, which depends more on the manufacturing process than on the microarchitecture of the CPU.
The 7700X is about 20% faster than Apple's M2 in SC perf in Cinebench R23.
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_benchmark-cinebench_r23_si...
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_benchmark-cinebench_r23_mu...
Personally I think the trade-off in cross-CCD computation is worse than the slightly lower all-core clock for the kind of workloads that benefit most from 16 threads, but I could see the benefits of higher all-core clocks for desktop use cases like gaming.
Does it seem like sockets are getting less and less years of support? Just 3 years of "longevity" doesn't seem that long, I probably upgrade my CPU once per 3 years and that would mean if I now move to AM5, I'm gonna have to yet again get a new motherboard when AM6 gets launched in ~2026.
I think it's more a matter of target: Intel probably care most about the pre-built market where people just buy a new computer, so there isn't much value. AMD focused on taking the enthusiast crowd and getting the mindshare that way, and long socket support definitely benefited them there.
Intel's approach, which means you can always count on the BIOS supporting your CPU if the CPU physically fits, and which meant a BIOS update would never remove support for your CPU, is honestly arguably the more consumer friendly approach.
In contrast, the upside of being able to slot a Ryzen 5000 CPU into a machine that you bought for first gen is a big deal in terms of the lifetime of those other components, and gives consumers a lot of flexibility. I get some people just won't utilise that and will buy fresh, but just because it isn't worth it for you personally doesn't mean it isn't a good feature more generally.
I think I've read somewhere that the cause of that issue was that the SPI block on older AM4 CPUs can only address up to 16 megabytes of the SPI ROM chip. There's not much the motherboard manufacturers can do, when it's hardware on the CPU itself which does the reading directly from the ROM chip.
You seem to have missed the point because the original discussion claimed that it was somehow "consumer friendly" to require the purchase of a motherboard as well. You've somehow morphed that into, "if I'm buying both a CPU and motherboard". The whole point was that you don't need to buy a new motherboard.
Note that AM5 was deliberately designed to fix those issues. All AM5 boards are capable of doing a bios upgrade without a CPU in the socket (the spec requires a USB port connected to the chipset which has a microcontroller that does it). AM5 motherboards also have a much higher minimum BIOS flash chip size.
With Intel it was cough up $$$ for a complete new system or nothing. Saying that is more consumer friendly is pretty silly - it's worse in every way.
In reality only a geek is going to upgrade their CPU, and a geek worth their salt should be able to sort out these issues.
It's worth noting that most of that was artificial; just enough electrical incompatibility to make you buy a new motherboard if you wanted a new processor (it's ultimately all just slightly different configurations of LGA1156 anyway- look up ASRock's P67 Transformer for more conclusive proof).
Back when they were competing against AMD (pre-2007) they only had one socket, that being LGA775 running from Prescott Pentium 4s all the way through the last Core 2 systems, and supported it for a very, very long time. Sure, it'd require your mainboard manufacturer to keep up to date with BIOS updates to support the new CPUs, but they were ultimately all compatible.
Regardless it’s still better than intels 2 generation change. With AM5 you should get 4-5 generations of cou minimum.
AM4 was very much a departure from the norm, and it’s also the case that compatibility was a pain in the ass. Whenever you wanted to upgrade you needed to read data sheets, watch reviews, wait for AMD to change their mind^, and then flash the AGESA on your board and hope.
^ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/03/amd-reverses-course-...
> The group responsible for developing and updating the PCI Express standard, the PCI-SIG, aims to update that standard roughly every three year. [1]
PCIe 6.0 is already released & uses the same transmission rate, but is PAM4 to send two bits per tick. Which I expect AM5 will be able to handle. Samsung is already making DDR6 ram. By 2026, there almost certainly will be pressure to advance the platform.
This platform feels amazing & fresh right now, & hearing it'll only have 3 years life does feel short. AM4 lasted >5 years. It'd be neat if AMD would back-release new processors on older sockets in the future, but I can also imagine the bios support for these scenarios being tangled & gross.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/06/months-after-finaliz...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32644878 (66 comments)
> Interestingly, AMD offered performance figures for three different TDPs: 65W, 105W, and 170W. The greatest performance gains are actually at the lowest TDPs, where the 7950X saw a 74% increase in Cinebench R23 MT performance. These advantages actually decreased as TDPs went up, dropping to 37% at 105W, and finally 35% at 170W.
[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/17552/amd-details-ryzen-7000-...
With ECC, this will be an amazing perf/cost server that can handle substantial load.
Besides Hetzner & OVH (who both offer AMD 59xx series chip), does anyone else offer these variant chips for dedicated hosting needs?
This isn't even the Threadripper Zen4 line -- if the desktop line is this good the HEDT line is going to be even more amazing-er.
the 65W TDP for the perf was something to be seen
Unfortunately, the market seems not to care much, so I "can't blame them" (well, I do blame them for the effect).
This is even more perplexing considering the laptop market, where power efficiency is crucial, and Intel should be dead now (Alder Lake hasn't been as efficient as hoped, and on Linux, the matter is even worse due to suboptimal support), yet, it's still the most common platform.
It was released much later in the lifecycle of Zen 3 than the 4 "headline SKUs" that were launched here as well. I think we can expect the same for Zen 4.
The 5x00 lineup has a few models with lower clock (5500, 5600, 5700), but they consume as much as their higher clocked counterparts (5600x, 5700x).
The hope is for a 7500 with lower TDP, which is a possibility.
Indeed every CPU announced here has a higher TDP than the previous generation, which isn't the best. Hopefully lower TDP SKUs come out as you mention.
They listed Zen 4 at 65w TDP being 74% more efficient than Zen 3 in their slides, which implies they do want to sell a part at that spec at some point.
If your concern is purely noise/heat and so on, and not budget, then you can just buy one of these chips and apply restrictions to it, given modern chips auto-scale performance. Can feel like a waste, of course, but should result in a very efficient setup.
If you missed the presentation, look for in-depth coverage[1]. These chips are more efficient than Zen 3, consuming less power for the same performance. The higher TDP allows for higher multi-core clocks and much higher performance, but that's not the same thing as power consumption (across all levels of performance).
Sure, if you can use the power at the high end, you can consume more power, but you'll get a lot more performance out of it.
[0] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...
> TDP stands for Thermal Design Power, in watts, and refers to the power consumption under the maximum theoretical load.
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/17552/amd-details-ryzen-7000-...
That's coverage from the slides, a.k.a. marketing. I don't doubt that this will be a significant performance/efficiency improvement, given the soft cap, but desktop is another thing. TDP has been correlated with average consumption, on Intel CPUs, and all the GPUs. It'd be surprising that this didn't apply to this specific CPU family.
I know from personal experience, my CPU rated for 105W TDP tends to consume 30W or less during my normal usage, though certainly more during heavy computation including gaming. Higher base clocks on the Ryzen 7590x (4.5Ghz) compared to Ryzen 5950x (3.4Ghz) could lead to overall higher power usage, if the increased efficiency at those clocks isn't enough to cover the difference.
I just built a new Zen 3 system (5600G without a discrete video card for now) and I found a place in the BIOS where I can set the max CPU temperature. It doesn't turbo boost as much then but it's fun at the least. For what I use that machine, I can drop full load power from 100 W to 70 ish by setting temp limits and only lose like 12% speed.
If you do your research you can get a board where you can set the power limit in W directly. I was in a hurry so I'll have to do with the temp cutoff.
This was a fairly memory-intensive task, but Matthew Dillon of DragonflyBSD writing up the Ryzen 2700X[1] he got in 2018 keeps coming to mind:
> I Enable XFR2, then set the PPT, TDC, and EDC limits. Set TDC and EDC high enough so they don't get in the way, then limit power consumption by adjusting PPT. By using the PPT limit instead of manually setting the CPU frequency, the motherboard gets the best of both worlds... it will idle just as low as it did before, it will still run one or two cores at full speed (~4.1 GHz), and it will ratchet down the frequency when all cores are loaded. Using a PPT limit with XFR2 is far, far superior to using manual OC frequency settings for the CPU.
> With standard XFR enabled in auto mode the 2700X will pull around 180W at the wall at full load. This might be useful if I had DDR4 3000 memory in it, but I don't, so there's no real need to pull that much power at full load. I was able to reduce this all the way down to 85W at full load without really impacting a concurrent -j 32 nativekernel NO_MODULES=TRUE test compile.
I really look forward to seeing how people throttle-down & get ultra-efficient 8c 7700X's with this new generation. (Especially now that the CCX die went from 12 -> 7nm.)
[1] https://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/2018-Septembe...
v-cache is AMD:s branding for attaching additional SRAM cache directly on top of the die using TSMC hybrid bonding, HBM is a JEDEC standard for DRAM. They have literally nothing to do with each other.
AMD currently has no published big APUs that would use v-cache, but many enthusiasts, including me, have noted that if they made one and allowed the GPU to share the last-level cache, it would potentially be a very compelling product for mobile. Who knows when/if they make one.
They do have upcoming discrete GPUs which are rumored to optionally contain v-cache (RDNA3, probably released as Radeon RX 7000).
The reduced power consumption doesn't hurt either; I needed constant ~1.27vcore for the 4.4ghz before.
Is the intention that some will cap the voltage at the wall?
At any rate, this demonstrates how much more efficient the Zen 4 cores at lower power when compared to Zen 3. If you need high clock speed across cores, you won't gain as much of the efficiency, but the potential here for laptops based on Zen 4 is extremely promising. In those cases, chips are often configured for a maximum TDP between 15W and 65W depending on use case (though some high end workstations and gaming machines are set even higher.)
I also expect some vendors to sell smaller computers that force the CPU to lower TDP due to insufficient cooling.
But, I expect the main reason for that slide is to draw attention away from the huge TDP increase.
Ryzen 5xxx L1 32/32, L2 512, L3 32768
Ryzen 7xxx L1 32/32, L2 1024, L3 65536
M2 L1 192/128, L2 16384, SL 8192
M1 Ultra L1 192/128, L2 49152, SL 98304
Ryzen 5xxxX3D: 96 MB of L3? https://www.anandtech.com/show/17337/the-amd-ryzen-7-5800x3d...
Like the 5800X3D it will use 3D stacking to squeeze more cache into the same die area
I can’t remember the exact article I read that in, but it’s pretty obvious when looking at Anandtech’s latency charts.
M1 latency: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
Ryzen latency: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di...
But it's not about "cache" per se, it's a different design. You need to do a lot more than just increase cache area to duplicate Apple's design choices.
[1] A big part of that is, of course, the architecture's genesis as a phone processor. Everyone loves to talk about how efficient the M1/2 are, but the truth is the CPU is a comparatively small part of the energy budget on devices with 5-10W displays. If you were designing a priori for a laptop, you wouldn't necessarily be as power-constrained in your design as the M chips.
There's a trade-off: a bigger cache means a higher latency. According to https://twitter.com/chiakokhua/status/1564413952108335105 this doubling of the L2 cache already caused an increase of 2 cycles of latency.
> Ryzen L1 32/32
> M1/M2 L1 192/128
This is a consequence of Apple using a 16kiB page size, while the x86 world is stuck with a 4kiB page size. For technical reasons (the L1 lookup runs before or in parallel with the virtual to physical address translation), the L1 cache can only be indexed by the bits which don't change between virtual and physical addresses (that is, the bits representing the offset within the page), making it hard to increase the L1 cache size while keeping its latency low (and a low latency is very important in the L1 cache).
I don't know the latency for the Apple L2 caches, but it wouldn't surprise me if it's higher than the latency for the Intel and AMD L2 caches; having a larger L1 cache would mean Apple can afford to have a higher latency to the L2.
The era of smaller form factors and increased efficiency is over for now.
I don't understand. Why will you relocate your PC outdoors? To help dissipate heat somehow?
Of course, having higher performance can actually be more efficient in some workloads, as there are cases where running for a short time at higher power draw and then reverting to a very low power idle state is better than running for longer periods of time at more limited power draw to do the same work.
They explicitly list a 25% performance-per-watt gain. They push more power to get even more performance, but you can choose if you want to do that. They claim at 65w TDP Zen 4 is 74% more performant than Zen 3.
Historically, it's never been a problem. One of my first distros was Yellow Dog Linux. There will be many more in the future.
https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/apple-takes-90-of-arm-pc...
Efficiency is critical on laptops, but not really on desktops. Electricity is incredibly cheap.
if you left a 300 watt desktop computer on 24x7 it would use ~$260 in electricity for the year.
https://energyusecalculator.com/electricity_incandescent.htm
it works out to $0.72 a day, a cup of coffee costs more
Beware, this is something that might change at short notice. Starting from October I'm paying 0.28€/kWh, making the daily 7.2kWh cost 2.02€, which would indeed buy me a cardboard cup of coffee at the kiosk.
There really isn't too many reasons why electricity should have "shock pricing" like this.
Here (Ontario) electricy prices are fairly flat over long time periods. https://www.oeb.ca/consumer-information-and-protection/elect...
probably because once the plants are built, the cost to maintain them is fairly fixed?
Off peak power is 8.2 kwh Feb 8, 2022 and was 8.7 back on Nov 1, 2016
in order for this to change, it requires government approvals so it wont be "changing at short notice".
They made a choice, now they see the results of the decision?
Maybe this will be a catalyst to revive nuclear?
Perhaps our shitty leaders can stop the "we hate carbon" mantra and start selling our massive natural gas supplies to Europe removing the shortages?
2. Politicians and their constituents often have many priorities other than electricity prices.
One thing is for sure, countries with the cheapest power are definitely not countries known for their great politicians.
If your politicians are not concerned about energy policy, you did not elect the right ones. Politicians should have the same concerns as those they represent.
Here (Ontario) we had the liberals who implemented many disastrous "green energy" programs including "fixed rate" contracts well above market rates. This resulted in substantial increases in our rates.
The price of electricity became a major election issue and when an election year came, the Liberals were decimated. They not only lost the election, but also lost party status.
Our politicians have a lot of influence over electricity rates including direct intervention:
- January 18, 2022 - Fixed Electricity Price The Ontario government has announced that electricity prices are to be set at the off-peak price of 8.2 cents per kilowatt-hour, 24 hours per day for 21 days starting January 18, 2022, until the end of day February 7, 2022, for all Regulated Price Plan customers. Read the government's news release and our FAQs.
-June 1, 2020 - Fixed Electricity Price The Government of Ontario introduced a fixed electricity price of 12.8 ¢/kWh for consumers paying time-of-use prices to support them while Ontario plans the safe and gradual re-opening of the province. Read the government’s news release and our FAQs
If your government has zero control over your markets, maybe you should ask if this is in your best interest?
Your chart proves very little. on the opposite end of the scale (expensive power) are many countries with questionable politicians as well?
Canada has some of the cheapest power for a free democracy, not sure why you think it is particularly worthy of criticism for high energy prices. You can thank your wealth of resources for that.
Our electricity prices going back to 2006 : https://www.oeb.ca/consumer-information-and-protection/elect...
It has gone up over time, but no "shock price hikes". To change the rate, you need government approval and politicians are not fond of hiking rates and losing votes.
Basic essentials need "user fees" so there is not blatant waste, but perhaps having controls in place is a good thing?
In Ontario (and most of Canada) we regulate Natural gas, electricity and water rates to prevent "gouging". Power rates in Quebec are even lower thanks to their massive hydro electric generation which is extremely cheap and this is passed to the consumers. Ontario is mostly Nuclear, which costs more to generate vs hydro hence our higher rates.
Well, it's a long story, but in short, Germany insisted on gas from Russia for two reasons: 1) it was cheaper than from other sources, 2) politicians hoped that they can somehow civilize Putin in this way. It didn't work well, and Mrs Merkel is embarrassed by it (I don't even mention previous chancellors).
https://www.oeb.ca/consumer-information-and-protection/elect...
If people value efficiency, they can buy energy efficient CPU's and not the latest and greatest high-power CPU's from AMD, which is what this thread is about?
Apple is a package deal and as such doesn’t cut into AMD’s market for console chips, servers or gaming systems.
Apple Silicon is great but doesn't serve every need.
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini
Maybe not everyone wants/needs to be locked into the apple Ecosystem?
PS. Electric cars are the past as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicl...
The Intel Mac Pro still exists because they haven't made a modular apple silicon machine and their remaining large scale video production customers would leave them if they were told just to to migrate to M1 Studio machines.
I don't see a similar argument for the Mini, especially as it's still on 8th gen. I'm honestly surprised Intel is still supplying Skylake CPUs for it
Perhaps they have a warehouse of these somewhere and they are still trying to unload them?
I see Intel based iMac's for sale at Costco yet they are not on Apple's site?
I think I saw a decently specced 21.5" Intel iMac going for $599 last year, although an M1 Mac Mini would still be my choice.
The success of x86 wasn't only due to software, but also thanks to the standardization of hardware and firmware. You can release a single image and boot it on every PC-compatible computer, because stuff like the BIOS, PCI, VGA, ... are all standard. A bare x86 CPU is of little use without all the thingamajigs that make a PC a PC.
Viceversa, on ARM outside the few boards or computers with an UEFI it's a far west of options, configurations, and so on. ARM PCs will never succeed outside of Apple closed garden until they get as convenient to install and upgrade as their x86_64 counterparts are.
I bought an M1 Mini early on and it's been an absolutely wonderful machine. But it's got 16 GiB RAM and a few ports on the back.
On the same desk, I've got an AMD 3900X w/ 64 GiB and expansion slots and room inside the case. The point being, different needs are being met.
Apple isn't ever going to win any hyperscale awards, but they're putting on a good show for HEDT despite Threadripper and other recent high performance CPUs. They're very good at what they're good at.
And for me, anything I'd want to put Linux on these days is either embedded or lives in a rack. Desktop is a big market, but give me something cool and silent or else far away any day.
I wouldn't buy an electric car right now, and I similarly wouldn't buy ARM desktop PC that's bundled with anal probing from Apple and unlimited limitations.
The answer of course is software compatiblity, OSes, CPU platforms, HW markets etc are not interchangeable, and x86 was and is the only practically open platform with big enough market that there's working competition between hw/system vendors, os vendors, sw vendors, etc.
Then eventually in the late 90s, x86 matched and later overtook the competitors, helped by the huge volumes leaving process investments of competitors too far behind. (Everyone had0 their own private fabs then, and process generations got expoenntially more expensive).
After the RISC camp struggled head to head with x86 for a few years the race was over in 5-ish years. Probably the 21164 and 21264 were the last chips to hands down beat x86 by a large margin. They had a Rosetta style translator back then and most (?) x86 Windows apps ran faster on the Alpha/WinNT platform than on fastest native x86 chip for a time.